Dice Holdings, which runs a number of job-listing sites including Dice.com, has acquired open source code-hosting repository SourceForge, software-index site Freecode, and tech-news discussion site Slashdot from parent company Geeknet, in a deal valued at $20m.
"The acquisition of these premier technology sites fits squarely …

Why? (who cares!)

"The deal caused some head-scratching from observers – why would a recruiting site want to acquire media and code-hosting businesses?"

Advertising, advertising, advertising.

Your (our) problem is that we're tempted to look at this with a reality vision in the back of our heads; some of my fellow posters also mentioned as much above: geeks (think Slashdot) use ad blockers.

But that is now how the suits look at this.. In Holland we have a nice saying: "Ongehinderd door enige kennis van zaken".. or: "Not disturbed with any knowledge on the subject..." is a good translation.

But to be honest.. The fact that El Reg carried this news /sooner/ than Slashdot itself is what I consider to be the real dealbreaker here.

Could it be they don't want the /. crowd to know? I'm not just saying this: a lot of times /. "beats" others such as El Reg to some of the technical based news. As such... puzzling...

"The fact that El Reg carried this news /sooner/ than Slashdot itself..."

That would be especially impressive with the quotes from the slashdot discussion. And slashdot, mostly posting links to articles elsewhere, is a follower sooner than a leader. Its strength (and weakness) is that it follows everyone (no matter how weak the source is).

Re: Why? (who cares!)

Re: Why? (who cares!)

hmmm.. Í'd rather translate that one as : "unfazed by a lack of relevant knowledge", or alternatively : "despite a lack of relevant knowledge". or...

Danged dutch to english depends on english context as us cloggies can put several shades of sarcasm and cynicism in english in a single dutch phrase, even without inflection.

As for the article, I don't think /. is that much of a target. Sourceforge all the more from a recruiting point of view.

Mind.. I have a feeling Dice will be *very* careful meddling with those communities, as the peeps in there are quite capable of packing up, moving house, and be back to Business as usual in nothing flat outside of Corporate grip if they see things they don't like.

'Tis a bit of a head-scratcher, yes.

dice.com is hopelessly american-centric, possibly moreso than slashdot. Just about the only non-NA jobs are jobs elsewhere that require USoA security clearances. Bit of a pity because the user interface looked more promising than the latest worsening from monster, who seem to think that artificially crippling the interface leaving you with much more work to do for the same result set constitutes a better user experience. I'd welcome competition here because monster is awfully big, to the point of having a virtual monopoly in more than a few countries, but I'm not confident dice.com will deliver, or even wants to try.

Slashdot's userbase makes more claims to being american-centric than it actually is. Maybe that'll change, but with these new owners, a bit more probably than not for the worse. Which could turn out to be bad news for sourceforge.

What I think dice're after is obtaining a "community" like the (still very much windows-centric and more-or-less USoA-centric) websites with reasonably successful tied-in careers sites like stackoverflow and and tdwtf, where it's done as a service to the community. There it's also built-up from within the community, there's a difference. (Compare and contrast monster with their relentless push to get you to sign up with them and then "connect" with facebook and linkedin, giving away yet more information. My cv and social contacts I don't need nicely bundled and owned by THEM, thank you very much.) Only coming at it from the commercial side, as it were. So they're trying to "innovate" but without a soul behind it, 'tis perilious going.

One might note that el reg briefly tried to test the waters teaming up with a British outfit that have several similarly-named websites that are nearly entirely infested with recruiter-reposts (Dominic knows just how much recruiters are hated in these parts) and that have a habit of spamming themselves (and hide behind well-known spammer-supporting ISPs, where abuse@ is entirely unresponsive, ie they're not merely poorly done and/or bad websites with very poor content, they're wilfully bad net citizens), but it seems they've left well enough alone, and so it should be. There's a limit to how much crap the product you're selling to your advertisers will put up with. One can but wonder how slashdot will react to dice and whether dice understands what it can and can not make the community accept.

Re: Has it happened yet?

Its not what it used to be

Things have changed since the early days on Slashdot, the quality of posts have changed for the worse IMHO. Originally they were more for the geek part of the spectrum but these days they seem to be more aimed at getting more eyes than quality.

Saying that, ads can't be the main reason, I do see the option to opt out of ads appear every so often even though I use Adblock when I can (can't on the tablet for example).

Still, Im puzzled on why a recruiter wants this type of site though.

#5613 & wondering how many on here have 4 or less digits in their uids - uid envy being one of the /. contributions people will remember ;)

Another four digit ID here. Signed up in the early days when the signal to noise ratio was very high, and the world of open source software was something that just bemused big business. I remember a boss at the time stating that he'd never allow the use of open source stuff - unbeknown to him our FTP server ran NetBSD and one team where using Linux machines to do batch processing.